


Mortal Repetition

by t0talcha0s



Category: BioShock 1 & 2 (Video Games)
Genre: (Does it count if he never like stays dead), Canon Compliant, Character Study, I can't stop writing about Delta, canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:00:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23781229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/t0talcha0s/pseuds/t0talcha0s
Summary: Delta recognizes his humanity insomuch that he recognizes that he was at one point A Human, thrice dead. He has trouble convincing himself of it now, that he was ever human, that he would ever be human enough to actually die.
Kudos: 20





	Mortal Repetition

Subject Delta has died four times. 

Before there was Delta, before there was Rapture, there was a man. He was someone, surely. He had a family, probably, likely a few drinking buddies, people who may have glanced at him amorously. He had a scar on the back of his right knee, this knowledge stuck. He was a child at one point, a teenager, a man, he was something. This something was so ephemeral after so many rebirths that Delta ignored all slight acknowledgements that he was real. Felt no association to this man, 

This man died in a diving bell, under the waves. Was there a family to benefit from this death? A child with a scant inheritance and fewer memories, a spouse with widow’s pay from the work-site, an aged mother who could no longer enjoy the coasts of her home country? Lost at sea, missing in action, workplace accident. Another ironic disappearance hovering around 63° North, 32° West. This man is a hazy shadow over Delta’s faceplate, enough death and change between them to be unrecognizable, a handsome Icelandic stranger with not as much substance as a candle flame. His memory as easily extinguished. His death was bureaucratic, all government documents and next of kin, he would never be held accountable for unpaid tabs. This man was there and then he wasn’t and then he was dead. 

He woke up again as Johnny Topside, astonished celebrity. Johnny walked the unfamiliar halls drooped with unfamiliar slogans, befriended dock workers, felt in himself a kinship in these working men. He asked about submarines, he asked about ways back up, he asked about names he’d never heard before: Ryan he was warned of, Fontaine was said to be worse. He met the journalists, the upper crust, the artists and the scientists, Rapture’s newest foreign play-thing. He met the right hand fist of Andrew Ryan and he met the cool greedy depths of Persephone Penal Colony. Johnny tapped his feet in his cell and admired the dark unknowable reaches of the ocean’s trenches. Delta does not remember this so clearly. Delta is extrapolating from what the people on the other end of his radio tell him, though his muscles pull him to familiar dining tables as he re-explores what was once his prison.

Johnny Topside died in a Fontaine Futuristics laboratory smothered by goop. Died from the firm grip of a genial hand, southern words dripping with all the conviction of a sure sales pitch _plasmid trials and just a bit of experimentation to get you out of this cell._ He was led and stripped and inserted into a suit of metal, the pressurized air far too familiar to diving lungs. Then there was nothing but grime and goo and needs that didn’t belong to him. There was an ever-present wind behind his faceplate pushing pushing in the direction of neat little bows down young girls spines and hands too small to curl around the fingers of his gloves. The triangle brand on his not-skin burning new meaning into his second resurrection, the birth of Subject Delta. 

Subject Delta died of suicide at plasmid-point. The green buzz of a mind that was no longer his own and the commands of a woman who sought to take the only thing Delta had any claim to. Delta was stripped of his exoskeleton and Delta was shot and Delta pulled the trigger himself with the wrap-around words of another woman lifting his aim to his temple. Delta remembers this death clearly- it’s the only thing he remembers as he considers every mirrored sensation a repetition of the old. He has no memory of his biological obligation to Eleanor because he still has it, no memory of the sound of old boots on older floors because his boots have aged but ring the same. This resurrection feels far more like a continuation, the same pressures, the same girl, the same removal of who he was from what he is. The death an inconvenience, an outlier in his ever-lasting. 

Delta was reborn in the green haze of a vita chamber and he doesn’t get it. You’d think death would have stuck with him at least once. He lumbers out of the tube and puts feet to ground searching for something which would finally stick. He is not suicidal because suicidal implies first and suicidal implies human and suicidal implies that Delta won’t just somehow get back up all over again. He is merely pragmatic. The deaths seem to be lasting longer now, that one lasted a whole ten years, or so he’s told by the people who tell him things about himself. Delta has no basis on which to believe these facts but it is certainly easier to take them at face value then to struggle. These people tell him a lot, sometimes what they contradict one another and they run together into a great collage of un-meaning

_That symbol on your hand marks you a dead man_ one says, blurring together the realities of lives past yet another assures _Subject Delta’s just a serial number, amigo_  
After a surprise of kindness _No monster does that, a thinking man does_ a contrast to the hypothesis that those like him _Big Daddies are just slaves_

Delta cares not for the semantics of his newest existence, a cool indifference to the fact that It Is. Beneath the grime beneath the metal and plastic beneath the three lives packed tightly into a one man suit there is no malice nor benevolence, all opinion lost in the layers which are the work of others. He understands that he is important in that this body, this suit has contributed important actions, he knows he is human in that there are people who look at him and surmise Man and presume human. He has little connection to the humanity he once bore. He has little connection to these people. Delta is not a man without a face because Delta is not a man and if one meets their gaze to the glass of Delta’s vision they will be met with a face. He is as these people want him to be and he is again dying. 

Eleanor’s hand wraps around Delta’s hand, drags it atop his chest. 

“You are my conscience Father” and Delta cannot tell her otherwise, that he is not her father, that he is not a man, that he is not human, that he is not a conscience, that he is just a metal suit that got up and walked into the problems of history. If he could tell her this he wouldn’t. Even as he gets the chance. Even as he is drawn through chest and suit and up into the body and mind of a girl who only knows half of what he is. What is another death, what is another rebirth. What is the great yawning future of another life which he assumes shall one day end. Maybe this time it’ll be permanent, maybe it’ll even be irreplaceably important, five chances feels like enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Delta's my guy y'know like he's a guy I can get behind. I know I write him a little differently then some people like but that's how we do up in here. 
> 
> HMU in the comments or on my ghost town of a tumblr @barefootcosplayer


End file.
